This is a companion piece to the author’s article The Communist International, Forged Passports and the Interwar Border Regimes in the Middle East, recently published in History Workshop Journal 98.
Amid much fanfare, one of the first acts of the second Donald Trump administration in the United States was to declare a national emergency on the US-Mexico border by ominously stating that “America’s sovereignty [wa]s under attack” and the “southern border [wa]s overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers” alike. The fear-mongering about the would-be border crossers from Mexico and Canada came as a continuation of Trump’s first term, not least his quickly backpedaled claims about 4000 terrorists trying to cross into the US from Mexico in 2018 alone. Even if many other things that his administration has done seemed unprecedented, even beyond the pale, his fixation on uncontrolled cross-border mobilities is already part of an international political mainstream. With the “fortress Europe” long having moved from the fringes of European politics to its very core, to the “border is honor” slogans of the center-left opposition in Turkey, the stiffening of border regimes is part of the new political Zeitgeist marked by the rise of the far-right and/or proto-fascist political forces.
Yet, the fears about the dangerous would-be border crossers – as well as border regimes as their remedy – have a long genealogy. The French Revolution had to deal with the question of passports precisely to stymie the cross-border movement of the ancien régime’s partisans, both to and from the country. The fact that Louis XVI could escape from France, capitalizing on the situation where aristocrats could have passports covering not only themselves but also their entourage, was a lesson hard learned.
If it is the fear of cartel members and jihadi terrorism that animates the discussion in the 21st century, a different type of cross-border specter haunted the emergence of modern border regimes. The second half of the 19th century was marked by a wave of political assassinations against the heads of state; Abdulhamid II in the Ottoman Empire and Louis Bonaparte in France are among the more famous survivors of tyrannicide attempts. Alexander II in Russia and US President William McKinley – incidentally cited in Trump’s inaugural address – would succumb to such political assassination. This was a world of violent political action, as depicted in Albert Camus’ The Just, and the way the cross-border movement was regulated through a number of conferences owed a great deal to the threat of political assassinations.
The 19th-century threats did cross borders: Giuseppe Orsini, the Italian militant who tried to kill Louis Bonaparte, traveled from Britain on an illicit British passport, and the gunners who targeted Abdulahmid II were part of trans-imperial Armenian groups. But the new protagonist of revolutionary politics in the post-World War One – the source of anxieties for some and the hope for others – i.e., global communism that emerged around the Communist International (Comintern) went a step further. Not only did Comintern’s militants travel across national borders, but its whole operation as a self-proclaimed World Communist Party depended on its ability to straddle across national borders seamlessly. In sum, the new global actor of international left-wing politics also represented the changing territoriality of revolutionary activism across the world: not a sum-total of national groups but a transnational militant body by definition.
As I showed in my recent HWJ article, the changing territoriality of the international left was contemporaneous with a similar watershed moment in the post-Ottoman Middle East. What was once a borderless imperial territory would soon be dotted with a number of new polities and borders that delineated them. This simultaneity made the Middle East an apt case to examine the process of national and imperial bordering and their confrontation with radical networks that were functioning more and more across borders due to this changing territoriality. New polities, as well as the rigidity of their borders, changed from one case to another – a new nation-state such as Turkey operated differently than the Class A mandates in the Arab East or land borders were more porous than maritime borders, yet the push to exclude politically undesirables from the body-politic – whether by revoking their citizenship, through expatriations or making sure they cannot cross the border to enter the country – remained a constant.
The global organization that channeled transnational mobilities in the Middle East and elsewhere is long gone. Yet, this hardly makes the question of border regimes and cross-border solidarities irrelevant, least of all in and for the Middle East. For one thing, political affiliation still trumps direct legal considerations in setting the tone for who is welcome to cross a border and who is not: with the collapse of Bashar Asad’s power, Turkish and Qatari commercial flights started landing in the airport of Damascus after a more than decade of hiatus: now it is the Iranians who are unwanted by the new rulers.
However, solidarity actions that span across borders have been at the forefront of international politics for a year and a half, with rallies and encampments in solidarity with Palestine mushrooming in virtually all major urban centers. Even though ideas across borders and not organizers inspired this movement of solidarity, the identity document and border regimes are yet again mobilized to quell the movement: German citizenship, hence the possession of a privileged European passport now depends on one’s position vis-a-vis Israel. In the US, the Trump administration just announced that foreign students taking part in Palestine solidarity actions – the insinuation being that those from the Muslim countries exert a nefarious impact on their “native” colleagues – could soon lose their student visas. At the time of writing, a Columbia graduate student was under arrest, facing the prospect of his Green Card being revoked and deportation. A Turkish graduate student, Rümeysa Öztürk, was also arrested and her student visa revoked, for nothing more than an op-ed she co-authored with other students. Dozens of others are stripped of their student visas for pro-Palestine activism. The soon-to-be German chancellor Friedrich Mertz made clear, ICC rulings against a head of state do not meet the bar to impede one’s travel: A university demonstration for Palestine does. In other words, politics once again trumps legality when it comes to cross-border mobilities.
Yet, one can take heart from the historical precedent that stiffening border regimes have always encountered formidable challengers in the form of resilient cross-border solidarities, and we have little reason to believe it will be any different this time.